Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Thursday March 25, 2010 @02:11PM
from the lotta-fresh-air-under-the-bridge dept.

superapecommando writes "If you haven't heard of Intellectual Ventures, you may want to check this out. Set up by ex-Microsoftie Nathan Myhrvold, with investments from Microsoft among others, it is basically a patenting machine – filing and buying them in huge quantities. Note that it doesn't actually use these patents – except to threaten people with. In other words, Intellectual Ventures is a patent troll – or, rather the King of the Patent Trolls. So I was interested to come across this extremely positive blog post on the company. That it is so positive is hardly surprising, since the blog is called 'Tangible IP,' and subtitled 'ipVA's blog on adding value through intellectual property.' Nonetheless, it provides valuable insights into the mindset of fans of intellectual monopolies. Here's what it says about Intellectual Ventures: 'They are an invention house, and have adopted and reinvented leading edge patent strategies to create a portfolio of their own IP which, in its own, would be of high high worth.' They don't invent anything in the proper, deep sense of the word; they merely file and buy patents – with no intent of ever making stuff or solving real-life problems."

Nathan Myhrvold is a friend of Bill Gates. They wrote a book together, The Road Ahead [amazon.com].

It seems to me that abusiveness is their business. They feel they have to be against something to make money. They scrupulously avoid doing something positive.

The book was an example of that. It was amazing. It seemed as though several editors went through the book carefully and removed any information that might be of interest. I say that because I don't think anyone could write a rough draft of such a long book that was entirely free of anything useful.

In the hierarchical world-view, it is not about how much you have. It is about how much more you have relative to everyone else. In a hierarchical world view, there is no such thing as 'win-win' because that keeps the relative positions unchanged, and that is a loss. All their are, are winners and losers. The game is played in order to force the losers into admitting they are losers, and acknowledging the winners. It is not played to accumulate wealth, that is just a means to an end.

That was the first line of the summary. Really, can't slashdot get an editor? Or even someone with journalism experience who would know to read something over before putting it on the front page? This story could not possibly have been so time-sensitive that it needed to bypass some common sense editing.

I hate idiot grammar trolls who don't understand that International English sometimes works differently from the American dialect. It's confusing to many English speakers from outside the US to use a naked modal verb without an auxiliary, and thus they use expressions like "I can do" or "I might do" rather than "I can" or "I might." In these cases "do" marks the absence of a true auxiliary. It's by no means ungrammatical or even unusual syntax.

This summary is a fine example of British English prose style; the only flaw I can find is that it uses appositional clauses a bit excessively.

There isn't one universal English style that will communicate any idea to anyone else who speaks English. For that matter, there aren't one or even two languages called English, but a whole host of them. I had a student from Singapore last year who was surprised to find out that American usage requires the verb "reply" to have an indirect object. He, and all his fell

Slashdot editors are Americans. The people who are supposed to edit stories speak the American dialect. So what is your point exactly? That because there are people in the world for who English is not the first language it is okay for a person for who it is, to suck at it?

By that logic, a doctor doesn't have to know medicine since lots of people don't know medicine.

Their Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org] implies that they actually do a decent bit of R&D themselves. I wouldn't call a company that does R&D and licenses the heck out of its work "King of the Patent Trolls." Of course, that assumes that the Wikipedia entry is accurate and all that. I can handle a company making money off of pure R&D. What I cannot tolerate is a company that makes money off of patents that it bought from someone else when it has neither a R&D base nor a manufacturing base.

What I cannot tolerate is a company that makes money off of patents that it bought from someone else when it has neither a R&D base nor a manufacturing base.

I don't have a problem with patent-only companies. Or rather, I dislike patent-only companies and hate patent trolls, but that's only because of the issues I have with patents more generally. As long as patents exist and are legal, it makes perfect sense (and is completely legitimate) for companies to spring up that deal exclusively in patents. In the same way that since stocks exist, are legal, and are ascribed value, it makes perfect sense for companies to spring up that deal only in buying and selling st

To me, what separates "patent troll" from "people with cool ideas and patents on them" is that one of them markets their product to people interested in developing them, and the other waits until someone else develops their product and jumps out and says "surprise!" More accurately, trolls try to claim the treble damages reward for "knowingly" infringing on the patent, despite the fact that the first anyone heard of the patent is the C&D after the product is already done and on the market. To keep the suspense up, trolls typically stretch patents in ways that nobody could have anticipated, and usually rely on the brain dead patent "continuation" mechanism to keep a patent application alive while adjusting it to fit what would otherwise be called prior art (PanIP's legendary rampage through the e-commerce sphere at the turn of the century was based on a patent "filed" in 1994 that was a continuation of a patent filed in 1984, meaning that all prior art had to be dated before 1984, even though the patent claimed to have invented things that were in use by others in the decade between).

I don't know how this company does their business, but http://www.intellectualventures.com/inv_main.aspx [intellectualventures.com] links to a blog at http://intellectualventureslab.com/ [intellectu...reslab.com] when you want to find out more about their patents. I'm sure if I put "shoot mosquitoes" or "mosquito laser" into google, I'll find that they've invented this, even if I have to "research" past the first page of hits (heck, they're even on the first page for "mosquito zapper").

On their website FAQ, go look for "How do you come up with your invention ideas?"

The answer is:"IV's invention efforts center on "invention sessions" which are multidisciplinary brainstorming events focused on a particular set of issues and possible solutions. IV typically hosts several 1-2 day invention sessions per month."

This process is described in more detail in the many breathless articles about IV. Their ideas come from reading papers written by people

Unfortunately the "reduction to practice" requirement was completely gutted in 1995 by an absurd bit of legal fiction called "constructive reduction to practice." Constructive reduction to practice: "[O]ccurs upon the filing of a patent application on the claimed invention." Brunswick Corp. v. U.S., 34 Fed. Cl. 532, 584 (1995). In other words, as soon as you write it down and file it, no matter how loopy/insane/impossible it may be in the real world, you have "constructively reduced" your patent to practice.

Sometimes legal terms are obscure because of long history and obsolete words; sometimes legal terms are obscure because of outré definitions of common words; and sometimes legal terms are batshit crazy.

You could argue they do deserve the patent because they never intend to license, and thus is against the intent of the constitutionality of patents. However event that would be weak since congress determines patent laws.

What they do is well within the patent concept.

However, if you are talking about software or business methods, then those are clearly outside the intent of patents.

This might be naive on my part, but I would argue that the spirit of patents is to protect the inventor's innovation, which in theory would take the form of some sort of product. The protection would allow the inventor to reap the benefits of his/her brilliance.

Essentially, making the invention process more "fair". But I think what we have instead is a system that's far from the spirit in which it was created.

I'm not necessarily saying that's the right way to do things (Nietzsche would have a field da

Don't forget, though, that patent protection is a government intervention into the free market for a specific social purpose that society has deemed to be important (i.e. spurring innovation by rewarding innovators with a guarantee of return on investment). They are not natural outcomes of a free market system, they are in fact a specific counter to a problem that the free market creates (i.e. tragedy of the commons). As a government-granted construct they need to be watchdogged very carefully because the

I don't know if anyone else around here remembers the state of slate/pen computing in the mid-to-late 90s, but there used to be a company called "General Magic" that made a touch-based graphical operating system for handhelds named "Magic Cap".

As the company kinda fell apart, there was an effort by some of the developers to open source it. But their intellectual property had been sold to Intellectual Ventures, because of some agent technology their stuff included. (Basically, imagine setting up a search on the handheld, and then briefly connecting to the internet to let your "search agent" run around inside a cloud, analyzing data and performing calculations. Then you reconnect and your agent comes back to you and presents the stuff on your handheld.)

Intellectual Ventures never really wanted most of the Magic Cap stuff. But they've made it so difficult to disentangle that the developers eventually gave up. Here's a writeup from one of the people involved.

General Magic made a graphical OS designed for handheld touch-based use, not based on a port of a desktop OS. And the people who built it tried to open-soruce it, but were blocked by Intellectual Ventures. If things had worked out differently, we might have had some really interesting work going on in the slate area long before the advent of the iPad.

(Heck. I'd love to run MagicCap on an iPad. It's the perfect hardware platform for it. I have three MagicCap devices myself.)

What does that site offer that Wikipedia lacks? On a wiki about software patents I would expect to find a list of the patents companies hold, for example. That appears to be encyclopedic information, which is exactly what Wikipedia is. I've seen a couple links to it posted here, by you or someone else, so I'm just curious what it brings to the discussion that isn't already there.

Whenever a capitalist talks about "adding value" or "creating wealth", they're really talking about creating scarcity. "Intellectual property" is the purest form of artificial scarcity, restricting the use of ideas, which otherwise can travel freely from mind to mind with negligible actual cost. A more mundane example is the way building houses drives up the cost of property by reducing the pool of available (or at least desirable) undeveloped property. (The housing bubble pushed this past the point of viability by building more houses than there were buyers for, but between inevitable population growth and the physical decline of abandoned houses, the situation will eventually return to normal.)

We end up with deceptive terms like "creating wealth" because few people would be enthusiastic about creating scarcity except, of course, for the people who already own the commodity being made scarce. Everyone else just ends up paying more for less. Intellectual property is particularly egregious in this sense because the scarcity is completely artificial, as opposed to real estate, where there really is a limited supply of raw material. Ideas, even good ones, are cheap and plentiful and very seldom actually unique; "ownership" is rather arbitrarily awarded to the company that has the resources to afford the patent process and gets it through the door first, with a strong incentive to do so as vaguely and broadly as possible so as to throttle as much actual creativity as possible.

Yes, that's true for companies that build "brands", rather than making a better product.

But, for Adam Smithites, anything you do to a product to make it more salable is "adding value."

For instance, you could grow trees, but most people don't have a use for a full grown tree. If you cut it into firewood, you've added value to the tree, and more people will pay you more money for the firewood, than for a full sized tree. If you instead turn the trees into fine furniture, you can get paid even more.

I'm not defending IP hoarders, and I think the general idea that Intellectual Ventures is pursuing is abhorrent, but they do indeed make things. Two weeks ago, Slashdot had a front-page article about a mosquito-killing laser system [slashdot.org] intended to be placed remotely and autonomously wipe out mosquitos, in an attempt to reduce malaria. Intellectual Ventures designed and built the functional system, which they've displayed in several places.

If anyone would like to read a somewhat middle-of-the-road (neither "IV IS GREAT!" nor "IP is the DEVIL!") discussion of Intellectual Ventures, The New Yorker did a somewhat in-depth article on them last year [newyorker.com] that I thought was interesting. I (being of the IP is the DEVIL! mindset) don't think he addressed the problems to society at large with having companies that primarily chew up intellectual advancement space by pre-emptive patenting. But, on the other hand, patents are time-limited, and if they patent lots and lots of stuff that just isn't feasible given current tech, in 20 years when it IS feasible, there will be prior art and the areas won't be patentable, so that could be a plus.

Yeah, gotta say, for a company that doesn't invent stuff... how'd they make a laser skeeter killer? I thought a patent troll (like, say, NTP) doesn't go through the trouble of manual labor outside of signing the checks to lawyers.

What if you could only own a patent if you manufactured something that used it? That would mean old unused patents would become public domain once they weren't needed (as determined by the market - if nobody was buying things that used it, and nobody made anything that used it, then the inventor could not hold the patent) Similarly, it means no one could buy a patent unless they were actively using it. It would remain with the original owner, or revert to the public domain if they went out of business.

I guess you might need protections then, to keep companies from just destroying another company to force the patents into the public domain. That could get sticky.

Could we do this with copyrights too? Ex: If you stop selling a book or piece of music, or stop selling a piece of software, it becomes public domain. That would help a lot with old video games. Hmm... what about art, where the artist doesn't want to make copies. Hmm....

Question #1:If I'm the inventor, do I have to physically crank the handle myself, or can I hire someone else to do that for me?

Question #2:Under your suggestion, if I own a patent (I'm the inventor, I manufacture) can I still sue other people for patent infringement?Or do you propose changing the nature of patents so that they grant the owner some sort of freedom-to-operate to practice their invention?

OK, now pretend that the manufacturer tells me to "fuck off" stops making royalty to me.Under your rules, I'm not allowed to sue them for patent infringement because I don't actually manufacture anything, correct?

They *paid* money to someone for their invention. Someone, supposedly,figured out something interesting, and, for whatever reason, decidedto take his money and run rather than let the invention stagnate.

Now, I don't like it when the patents are not for anything interestingor novel, but simply being a patent troll is not a bad thing. Being a patenttroll of "obvious stupid" patents does seem like a bad thingand is more of a fault of the people who *granted* the patentto begin with.

They *paid* money to someone for their invention. Someone, supposedly,
figured out something interesting, and, for whatever reason, decided
to take his money and run rather than let the invention stagnate.

Did they pay more than the cost of getting the patent in the first place? Can someone make a living selling patents to companies like IV?

Why this matters: If you can make a living creating stuff, then selling the patents to people who actually build stuff, then the patent system mostly works. If they are only finding almost dead patent holders, crushed by the system, offering them pennies on the dollar, then the system could use some tweaking.

I don’t know how it is in the US, but in Germany, if you don’t actually use a patent, then after a specific time, your patent automatically becomes void.This is to stop people who aren’t serious about doing something with it. Because then, the original point of the patent goes away.

Sorry, you are mistaken here - you think of trademarks, which have to be used. There is no such clause for patents. (Disclaimer: Currently working at a patent law firm in Germany. IANAL, and especially not yours, this is no legal advice;)

I haven't crossed paths (yet) with IV, but I do believe that they are fundamentally evil. They're a natural consequence of bad laws and legal practice.

They like to describe their model as "Hey, Mr. Inventor, we'll buy your patents, or help you patent your stuff, and even pay you to work on it". This approach is appealing in principle, and to be sure, it does put some money in the hands of those inventors.

The problem is that what the Patent Office treats as an "invention" is almost completely unrelated to what constitutes an "invention" in the real world of commerce. A patent-office invention is just an idea. It doesn't have to be manufacturable, it doesn't have to be a viable product, it even doesn't have to work. It just has to be interesting and complicated enough that a relatively unskilled patent examiner cannot find a good reason to deny a patent. And since the examiner has only limited time (small number of hours) to examine each invention, and he's goaled on patents issued, not denied, well, pretty much anything can be patented.

(When I refer to examiners as "relatively unskilled", I don't mean that they're dummies--but rather, that they are generally less practiced in the art of patent management than the high-powered patent attorneys who craft the applications they're reading. Indeed, an awful lot of good examiners end up turning into those high-paid attorneys, after taking a few yeas of "training" at the Patent Office.)

A real-world invention, on the other hand, has to be something that makes money. It has to work. It has to be manufacturable. It has to be sufficiently well-developed as a product that people want to buy it. And getting to there from the idea stage requires real resources: money to pay engineers, money to advertise and market, etc. And ultimately, of course, a real-world invention has to make a profit: the costs ought not to exceed the revenues.

So what IV is mostly doing is creating or buying patent-office inventions and using those to extract money from entrepreneurs and companies that are trying to create real-world inventions. They're a tax on the real resources that are required to turn an invention into a product, and in that role, they far more often prevent useful products from reaching the market, by increasing their development costs too much for a profitable result. Sure, there are a few poster-child inventions where IV has invested their own resources, or where someone else's profit is feasible even at IV's royalty rates, but those cases are rare--and exist for press releases.

IV's costs are minimal, because they mostly just get smart people together to brainstorm. The ideas are copied down by patent attorneys, turned into applications by IV's legal team, and pushed through the Patent Office. Once issued, a patent is presumptively valid, and fighting it is a crapshoot. So if IV comes to you, you either license or fold, because they have more and better lawyers. They generally do nothing to turn an IV patent into a real-world invention, and they bear none of those real costs.

It is a brilliant business model. At minimal costs, IV exploits a fundamental and likely unfixable problem with the patent process, namely that most modern inventions are too sophisticated, complex, and interrelated for the process to address--yet the government guarantees a monopoly, so you have to play within the system, or be subject to patent litigation that is completely unpredictable (except for its multi-million dollar cost). The patent "reform" proposals floating around just nibble at the edges; the system itself is fundamentally broken.

Owning patents is a very lucrative business beyond merely patent trolling. I've worked with a number of clients who own a bunch of patents, ranging from a handful up to a few hundred. They're routinely traded, sold or licensed. Sometimes I'm left with the impression that it's like trading Pokemon or baseball cards. Its basically trading in information. In one particular case the patents all fall under a range of related of technologies and services which the company is actively developing. In other cases it seems like investors pick and choose patents they consider to have potential and develop the technology to a point where it can be sold off for a hefty sum to another company.

To be honest, I'm not sure how I feel about it. In many of these cases they end up doing something with the patents but there's something about this that leaves me with the impression that it's violating the spirit and intent of the patent system. But one thing is certain, we're unlikely to see any substantial and profound changes in the patent system because too many people have too much to gain from the system in its current form. And I think one of the underlying problems here is the litigious nature of this country. Perhaps we need a loser-pays system introduced?

The main requirement for entering this business--inventing things--is a complete lack of a soul (or conscience, if you'd rather).

It is pure greed and power mongering the way things stand and in the end the result is LESS innovation.

When I was 20, I used to do Q/A for a company that made lancets (a device to prick the skin to draw a drop of blood for analysis, usually blood sugar levels). One day I realized that there was a better way. The device I was inspecting daily had over 30 parts and ended up costing the retail customer around $35. They still had to purchase disposable tips that were one-use only and had to be safely discarded so as not to infect others.

In less then a week I had a flawlessly-working prototype of a disposable, single-use device that not only was sterile (didn't rely on packaging to achieve), but also cost less then $.10 to make and had ONE moving part (for a total of three parts in its entirety) and was completely safe to simply throw away (the needle that did the actual pricking was drawn back inside the case after it did it's thing), making it particularly attractive to hospitals.

I tried to shop the idea to my employer who seemed totally unimpressed and never brought it up again. I then tried to shop it to Becton-Dickenson (the worlds largest maker of syringes) and was pretty much told they didn't accept submissions from outside their own R/D dept.

A few months ago my mother hands me one. The device I designed. It turns out the doctor she saw that day had used it on her and she decided to keep it and show it to me. It was essentially my design with the sterility factor removed. They relied on the packaging to keep the device sterile until used.

After some research, it turns out that not only did my ex-employer have his name on the patent for it, but also the guy I spoke to on the phone at Becton-Dickinson. They had somehow both found out the other knew about the idea, waited 7 years to patent (since I did not patent it in that time) then simply co-submitted the patent, then went into production. They sell it to this day.

In short, they could have written me a check for $5k (I was hurting for tuition back then and could REALLY have used it), had full rights to the idea and not had to wait 7 years. Instead, they CHOSE to simply fuck me over. Nice guys.

Now, I ask you slash-dotters, what fucking incentive do I have to EVER bother trying my hand at inventing again? The knowledge that my idea at least made it to people that can use it?

There's a middle ground between 'every idea or work of art is free' and 'we've patented inspirating oxygenated air through an orifice, now pay up.' And no, it is NOT how capitalism works, it is how government granted monopolies work, that's about as far from real capitalism as you can get. As intellectual property is imaginary, made up by people using legislation, not the free market, for OUR benefit, not the inventor's, WE get to decide what's acceptable and what's not.

If you want to philosophise, tangible property is also made up by people using legislation. You have a government granted monopoly on your tangible property: there's nothing in the laws of physics to say that it's yours.

You are correct that patents/copyrights exist for the benefit of the people, from a US Constitutionalist viewpoint. You the people have decided, via a representative democratic system, that the concept of intellectual property is more appropriate than the concept of temporary monopolies gran

Bullshit. I can protect my own tangible property. If I sell it, I don't have it anymore. If I sell my patent or copyrighted work, I still have it, but you also have it, and can sell it.

It takes FAR more government intervention to protect real property than it does intellectual 'property.' And far more intervention to protect real property than it does to protect personal property. Not all forms of property are the same, or require the same amount of government protection.

You don't understand the difference between rival and non-rival goods, do you? How can you share your invention and protect it from everyone, everywhere around the globe, who will copy it? Please try to think these things through before wasting my time with silly arguments that simply don't work. I only have to protect one house or piece of land. I have to protect every copy of my art or invention from everyone who ever sees it.

I'm not going to explain economics 101 to you just so we can have an intelligent

I'm for rolling back patents to the duration that our first patent laws granted, which as I recall was fourteen years. The purpose of patents, is that the state grants a monopoly on their use to the inventor in exchange for disclosure, so that inventors have a reason to tell the public how to do something instead of keeping them as trade secrets which may be forgotten when the inventor dies or goes out of business.

I'd say it was a mistake to ever consider a patent a form of property, as opposed to a contr

I don't know the numbers for the US, but in Europe, the average lifetime of a patent is 8 years - US numbers are probably not that different, as it costs an increasing yearly fee to keep patents alive. Patents do not suffer from repeated lifetime extension like copyright does. The maximum duration of 20 years for patents is only realized for really profitable stuff. If you want to rally against endless IP protection - target copyright.

There's a middle ground between 'every idea or work of art is free' and 'we've patented inspirating oxygenated air through an orifice, now pay up.'

Our society doesn't work that way anymore. We can't find any common ground because once one side gains prominence, they use rhetoric and apathy to slowly move society to the more radical position. We have lost the ability to apply common sense, particularly where it comes to the interpretation of the law.

Wrong. The only reason patents and copyright exist is government intervention. Without that, I could sell someone else's work as my own. We wrote the law, without which, there would be no such thing as copyright or patents. Without a law, real and personal property would still exist as such.

As a voter, I get to vote for representatives who will define copyright and patents as I think they should be defined. Read the constitution and tell me why we even have patents and copyright? To advance the arts and sci

The difference between rival and non rival property is that I only have to protect the one piece of rival property, whereas I would have to protect every single piece of non-rival property of mine out there, because it can be copied.

Without the law, you would have to shoot everyone who sings your song. Your argument is so dumb, I feel stupider just from rebutting it.

For some more devilish advocacy to the free marketeers around: I recently heard a talk by an expert for trade law. He basically made the point that the usual patent function theories, e.g. incentive for innovation, reward for inventors, and so on, are besides the point. In his view, the main point of patent law in particular and IP law in general is to make inventions, and in extension, intellectual property, a trade-able commodity. Only if inventions can be traded, their true value can be assessed. The tru

Yeah I'm more inclined to think the problems are in the system itself. I mean if this company files patents on things it reads about, or obvious things, that is trolling (and despicable), but if they merely invest in patents that others have created there is nothing wrong with that at all. I may not like the patent system, but there is nothing wrong with venture capitalism per-say. Article is light on details though, and I wonder why the article said it's hard to know how many patents a company holds.

Replying to myself as I found more details in the economist article about the actual trolling activity this company engages in:

The idea of raising money to invest explicitly in creating patents is not new, Mr Myhrvold notes: that is what Thomas Edison did. But firms such as his will seek to institutionalise the process so it is not dependent only on a single inventor. Intellectual Ventures has 650 employees, not all of them patent attorneys, and as well as buying patents it develops ideas in-house. In 2009 it applied for about 450 patents for its own inventions—more than Boeing, 3M or Toyota—putting it among the world’s top 50 patent-filers.

Someone invented something which otherwise someone else would have invented sooner or later. Extremely likely sooner if history of inventions tells us anything.

That's how capitalism works

Yes

- the free trade of commodities.

No, only tradee. It is designation of non physical goods as capital to be owned and traded. A fundamental part of capitalism, but completely opposite of any free market theory that deals in distribution of scarce goods.

For the year 2008, the Federal Reserve estimates that the value of U.S. manufacturing output was about $3.7 trillion (in 2008 dollars). If the U.S. manufacturing sector were a separate economy, with its own GDP, it would be tied with Germany as the world's fourth-richest economy. The GDPs are: U.S. ($14.2 trillion), Japan ($4.9 trillion), China ($4.3 trillion), U.S. manufacturing ($3.7 trillion), Germany ($3.7 trillion), France ($2.9 trillion) and the United Kingdom ($2.7 trillion).

Manufacturing has seen the same changes over the last forty years that agriculture saw over the previous two hundred: Productivity per worker rose so much that fewer and fewer workers were needed to produce just as much stuff. This freed those workers to do other things, increasing the wealth of society. So manufacturing jobs have fallen--but we produce more than we ever have, and more than anyone else, including China. This is a GOOD thing, because it frees those workers to do other things, producing more goods and services for society as a whole.

While this is encouraging, I wonder if these numbers are in local currency. We might produce more, but in comparison to China the immediate $ value is higher (in China, the output is cheap enough that even after shipping it across the world it's still cheaper).

My other concern is that we're not going to see the advancement due to less manufacturing jobs as we saw with farming. Farmers had to be self-motivated (to at least a certain point), be independent, and show ingenuity. Being a factory worker doe

These numbers are bogus. They include products made abroad by nominally American companies. All the cars produced by GM in China are counted as part of this. If you remove the offshore production, the GDP and manufacturing has been in decline for more than a decade. This has been exposed multiple times in the business press. BusinessWeek had an excellent article on this about a year back.

Are you claiming the Federal Reserve is lying about basic economic statistics? That's actually a far more serious charge than saying they failed as regulators.

Are you kidding? The government manipulates the Consumer Price Index on a regular basis, this is a fact!

If sector X (ie energy goes up in price), then X's weighting is magically reduced. By their standards we all own computers that would otherwise be worth millions of dollars in the 60's so we're ALL rich. Of course, the average person can't afford proper health care or a diet of non-processed food, but WE'RE RICH!

The original poster has correctly stated a fact, which I acknowledged, but he failed to provide context for it. The richest country in the world having the highest value of manufacturing is what would be expected. Now, do they outperform other economies in terms of manufacturing per capita, per gdp, or exports as a percentage of GDP? These numbers would indicate a strong manufacturing sector.

The GPP stated

We don't actually make much anymore, we just invent it and have someone else make it. If we don't control the profits from the inventing, we're fucked.

And, judging from the export numbers, he's right, so I said

We're between Burundi and Cape Verde, at number 179 [in exports per gdp]... These numbers are by "value added" manufacturing. So, we've got a lot of bullshit that we put together that's manufactured almost entirely in east asia. Gluing it together, shoving it in a box, and then raising the price is not what I would call manufacturing.

You make the mistaken assumption that IP adds value to an economy. It doesn't. It's a way of redistributing, and eventually, removing value from the economy; those paying for the IP are in the economy subject to the IP, those receiving the payment may or may not be. Fundamentally it's equivalent to a taxation form where the recipients may be outside the economy where the tax is levied.

So saying we need IPR to make a profit in the future is the equivalent of saying we need more taxes and we need to give corp

If I invent something, I should be free to parlay that IP into as much profit as I want to, through whatever means suit me (including selling to an IP house), within some reasonable timeframe.

Similarly, if I buy somebody else's invention (as an IP house), I should have the ability to control that IP to protect my investment for some reasonable period of time, and so long as I can prove I am actively working to realize value from that IP and I'm not just sitting on it in order to stifle innovation.

Read the US constitution if you'd like to understand why the time frame must be reasonable. We get to define what reasonable means in this case, through legislation. But it must, theoretically, be a limited time. Patents are still limited to a reasonable time, IMHO, but copyright terms are ridiculous and counter to the stated purpose of encouraging the arts.

Read the US constitution if you'd like to understand why the time frame must be reasonable. We get to define what reasonable means in this case, through legislation. But it must, theoretically, be a limited time. Patents are still limited to a reasonable time, IMHO, but copyright terms are ridiculous and counter to the stated purpose of encouraging the arts.

Agree fully. But if the stated purpose is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Art", in this Age of the Digital Reproduction of Works, I think the "reasonable" limited Time to be secured to Authors and Inventors for optimal promotion of Progress and useful Art would be on the millisecond scale.

So, only live productions should be protected? Why would inventors or artists release their works at all if they only had milliseconds to profit? That isn't promoting anything. Before we go all the way to millisecond terms, let's try going back to the original terms outlined by our forefathers in the constitution.

Heck, since we're using weasel words anyway, let's just reduce all laws to:"You are free to do anything as long as it's reasonable.

I agree with you about the ambiguity of the parent's proposal. How about - the life of a patent is halved with each transfer of ownership? This is unambiguous and severely cripples any potential for patent re-selling, while still retaining significant value for the 1st buyer to make money off of (allowing for inventors to sell their inventions and continue to invent instead of being forced to produce their invention themselves), if the buyer is actually ready/capable to bring the technology/product to market.

Profit, or payment? They aren't the same thing, you know. Fair payment for honest work is not evil. Unfair profit from someone else's work is at least a little evil. And there is a middle ground between giving it all away and lazy, parasitic, rent-seeking behavior.

Copyright, trademark, and patent rights are defined by the government here in America. They are not natural rights. Thus, it is up to us to decide how to use them to our advantage. That is why we created them: for OUR advantage, not for the artist

The question I have is how many of these things are down to earth inventions, and how many are just academic ideas that they just decided to patent? When I say academic idea, I mean something along the lines of "Hrm, an observer model would be good for notifying an application about a change in a sensor". Even if nobody had done it before, does that make it an invention that should be patentable? And what about the delineation between method and implementation? You can increase the power band of a car engine by using variable valve timing. Should that in and of itself be patentable? What about the specific method that uses oil under pressure to laterally move the camshaft along a threaded "valley" to alter the timing (Basically Honda's V-Tech)? One is an idea/concept, and the other is an implementation. IMHO, an idea is useless without a specific implementation, and ideas should not be patentable. The problem with this, is that most of the software patents I've seen patent the idea, not the implementation. Now sure, with software the line between idea and implementation is much finer, but that's more of an argument towards the patent-ability of software in general, not what constitutes an implementation...

It's a legitimate issue in the technology sector. All we keep hearing from political pundits and professors in the classroom is that innovation will drive the economy, lead you out of your bankrupt and unemployed community, solve world hunger and cure cancer.

And yet the patent system is structured in such a way that encourages this sort of corporate behavior, culminating in companies like Intellectual Ventures who, given that they don't produce anything per se, exist almost exclusively to stifle innovati

Obviously the intent of my post was to poke fun at the level of discourse here on/., not to discourage discourse altogether. As a patent attorney, I find the level of discourse here is usually comprised of knee-jerk, anti-patent rhetoric that is not particularly well thought-out.

Intellectual Ventures who, given that they don't produce anything per se, exist almost exclusively to stifle innovation

Ah, but this is not even remotely certain. Actually, several economic papers give documented facts about how patents actually discourage innovation. (I remember that one of them was linked to in a recent discussion, but I don't have the time to search now)

Can someone explain this stuff to me? Can you really patent ideas for things? Like, can I patent "A method of energy production whereby isotopes of hydrogen and helium are fused to release heat" without ever working out the details? If so, where's the monetary incentive to make ideas work?

No you can not, at least that is what the law says. It says you must "reduce to practice," your idea. The patent office has been doing a poor job of late making sure application fulfill that requirement. Patents can b